Some of my deepest growth as a songwriter has come from taking a great song and dissecting it. Today, that's what we're going to do. Even though this isn't a congregational worship song, it's so well-crafted I couldn't resist unpacking it to find some hidden songwriting treasures.

What an amazing day of personal freedom when I learned for myself that God’s Church is beautiful and complex, she is brilliant and she is brutal and she is worth serving and loving with every fiber of our being. She is worth protecting, worth fighting for and worth every tear and scar...

Just like many other areas in life, writing is a balancing act. It takes a while to get your bearings when you are just starting out, but eventually you begin to see three separate types of writing sessions emerge: writing by yourself, writing with a Paul, and writing with a Timothy. I believe that in order to make the best use of your gift, you need to have a good balance of all three.

It doesn’t always make sense, but it’s true. We are quick to run to God when our hearts get bumped, bruised, scraped up a bit. But ironically, the really deep, painful things that we experience are much harder to run to Him. Maybe it’s because we blame Him. Maybe we want to pretend they are not there. Either way, those are the things we cover with our own band-aids, so no one can see how deep they are. Not even God.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about spiritual gifts and how they relate to being a songwriter. While I know the Bible doesn’t talk specifically about music being a spiritual gift, I believe it is definitely a form of delivering one.

Recently, my pastor, Charlie Weir, shared something about David that I’ve never heard before. He was talking about David and Goliath, and how the encounter with Goliath was not the first time David had to fight. Being a valiant shepherd boy, he had killed lions and bears with his bare hands. It took killing lions and bears to prepare him for killing a giant. But by the time he faced the giant, he was so confident because of his experience with God’s faithfulness before.

The more days I live on this planet, the more I realize how difficult it can be to complete anything with determination, and see it all the way through. It almost feels like there are so many excuses not to finish things well, many of which I have heard coming out of my own mouth. There are many more people called by God than actually complete the mission.

ecently, my husband Eric and I have started a new work out program. One of the requirements of this program is to drink half your body weight in water - which I have heard time and time again. When I actually started measuring how much water I was truly drinking, though, I realized I was dehydrated. In fact, I realized that what I was taught by this new program was true for me. Many times I believed I was hungry, and I was actually thirsty. Once I started drinking enough water, it was almost as if I got more thirsty!

We worship constantly. We worship when we don’t realize it. When we don’t feel like it. When it’s not intentional. It can really be quite subconscious...coming from a habit or even addiction. We give things value. We make them a ritual. Like coffee (guilty). Maybe it could be...shoes (guilty). Or our set list, our children, our gear, our appearance, our instrument, our title, our role, our romantic relationship (or lack there of). Maybe it’s food, the gym, the latest Netflix binge. Whatever it is for you, we are giving it a high value in our lives. We’re giving those things preference. Attaching significance by the sheer amount of time we devote to them and by the headspace they take up.